Whither Twitter?

I've removed my Twitters from my blog, but left the link for my Twitter page available.

Part of the reason was technical-- Twitter's popularity sometimes exceeds its ability to display information in a timely manner, and if it causes my page to load too slowly, I have to jettison it.

Another reason might be construed as more of a "marketing strategy." In Twitter, the number of people "following" your twitter feed says something about how popular/significant your twitter feed is-- it's a "social networking" thing. By displaying all my twitters on my blog where anyone could see it, there was never any reason for anyone to sign up for Twitter to "follow" me. (cf. Free Milk and a Cow) So, if someone really wants to see what I'm twittering about, they can do so through the "Twitter feed" link, sign up for a Twitter account and "follow" me.

The final reason is personal-- I like having some idea of who is following me and the *possibility* of controlling who reads my twitters. At the moment, it's wide open because I generally prefer to be that way. Unfortunately, in the past I've had to deal with a stalking ex-girlfriend and griefers-- if that should happen again, I'd like to be able to click a button and make sure that only people I choose can see what I express in my 140 character outbursts.

Some changes for 2008

Just a quick heads up about some changes at this blog--

I've ditched the default style because it was tired. The new default style is W3C's Midnight, and you can still use the style selector to pick from the alternate stylesheets (Swiss, Steely, Chocolate, etc.) It's worth mentioning that this blog uses Javascript and cookies to pull off that style selector gimmickry, so if you don't have Javascript enabled or are paranoid about cookies, consider yourself warned.

Speaking of cookies, this blog also uses Google Analytics to track visitor statistics. This helps me figure out how few readers I have (LOL!), which posts get the most attention, which search engines and keyword searches are bringing people here, etc. Once again, this feature uses Javascript and cookies to do its magic, so if you are concerned about that as a privacy issue, I've made you aware and you can take appropriate measures.

And yes, I was finally able to log back in to Blogger late last night. I'm still not entirely sure what the problem was, but it was localized to my Firefox browser. Once I determined I was able to log in on the same computer with Safari, I knew it had to be a setting and/or Add-On within Firefox that was preventing me from successfully logging in. I wound up disabling all my Add-Ons and dumping all my cookies, and was finally able to get back in.